- My colleague Greg Young recently heard from some Bigfoot videographers after his post “Unicorns, Pixies, and Enterprise UTM”, wherein he correctly stated that, “At Gartner, we haven’t seen enterprises shifting to using UTMs or SMB multifunction firewalls, nor do we forecast that this will happen any time soon.” Remember, Gartner hears from many thousands of customer organizations of all sizes, and rarely do we hear about core UTM deployments among large customers. When we do get inquiries about this, they are almost uniformly about firewall/IPS-only deployments in boxes with “UTM” on the bezels.
I won’t rehash all the arguments Greg’s critics have put out there. Sure, they probably do know of a few enterprises with full-on UTM deployments, especially if they have (or have had) some connection with an “enterprise UTM” vendor. For the sake of argument, let’s call these “Bigfoot sightings”. People see large hairy creatures, find physical evidence, perhaps even interview corroborating witnesses; at the end of the day, however, actual enterprise (not branch) UTM deployments make real core UTM sightings worth noting for their extreme oddness.Don’t just take my word for it, ask the companies themselves, as we have in our IT Key Metrics studies, wherein
- Approximately 15% of respondent companies have gross revenues greater than $40 billion.
- Slightly more than 33% of respondent companies have gross revenues between $10 billion and $40 billion
- The remaining 52% companies/organizations have gross revenues of less than $10 billion.
See the following chart – not just UTM, but any integrated security appliance ranks last on the list of respondents’ 2009 priorities, unchanged from the previous year’s results.. I’ve obscured the list of technologies to avoid “giving away the farm” in a blog post, but suffice it to say that “Integrated Security Appliance” ranks well behind “Intrusion Detection/Prevention” and “Firewalls”, and trails “Spam Filtering” and “Web Site Filtering/Blocking” as well.
- IT Key Metrics Security Priorities, 2009
What’s most interesting about these results is not that “Integrated Security Appliance” is last in a best-of-breed enterprise security buying world, but that it has not improved its standing year over year.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jack Daniel // Oct 5, 2009 at 6:33 pm
It isn’t really “Bigfoot video” when you can pick up the phone and easily verify their existence, from multiple vendors with customers in multiple industries. But, when you’re wrong, go with flamebait, at least it keeps things interesting, which is unique for Gartner (See, I can be childish, too).
Greg made the claim that no enterprises use UTMs, and he was wrong. Had he not gone for hype and hyperbole of the absolute there would be no story- I doubt anyone would argue that UTMs hold a significant market share in large enterprises (except for the ones Greg was forced to exclude to make his point).
(Still not speaking for my employer, this drivel is purely my own).
2 Tweets that mention Enterprise UTM: When Bigfoot Videographers Attack! -- Topsy.com // Oct 5, 2009 at 6:38 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jack Daniel and Greg Young. Greg Young said: Gartner blog: Enterprise UTM: When Bigfoot Videographers Attack! http://bit.ly/2ZaZpX [...]
3 Greg Young // Oct 5, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I think Adam makes the same point: that the data supports the analysis that there is no big marketshare of enterprise UTM. There will be a few niche sightings, but it just isn’t happening.
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